Related papers: The Warped Plane of the Classical Kuiper Belt
Recently, a number of planets orbiting binary stars have been discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In a few systems the planets reside close to the dynamical stability limit. Due to the difficulty of forming planets in such close…
This paper investigates the spin precession of test particles moving in the equatorial plane of general stationary and axisymmetric spacetimes using the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equations. The spin precession angles for two cases, the…
In a purely Keplerian picture, the anomalistic, draconitic and sidereal orbital periods of a test particle orbiting a massive body coincide with each other. Such a degeneracy is removed when a post-Keplerian perturbing acceleration enters…
This work studies the periapsis shift in the equatorial plane of arbitrary stationary and axisymmetric spacetimes. Two perturbative methods are systematically developed. The first work for small eccentricity but very general orbit size and…
Motivated by a desire to understand the size distributon of the Kuiper Belt, an observing program was conducted at the Mount Palomar 5-m telescope from 1994-1996. The observations consisted of follow-up observations of known objects (in…
The Kepler mission enabled us to look at the intrinsic population of exoplanets within our galaxy. In period-radius space, the distribution of the intrinsic population of planets contains structure that can trace planet formation and…
We present a test for spin-orbit alignment for the host stars of 25 candidate planetary systems detected by the {\it Kepler} spacecraft. The inclination angle of each star's rotation axis was estimated from its rotation period, rotational…
We determine the influence of the Milky Way's warp on the kinematics of stars across the disc, and therefore measure its precession rate and line of nodes under different assumptions. We do this by applying Jeans' first equation to a model…
Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…
We report a linear ordering of orbits in a sample of multiple extrasolar planetary systems with super-Earth planets. We selected 20 cases, mostly discovered by the Kepler mission, hosting at least four planets within \sim 0.5 au. The…
Resolved observations of millimetre-sized dust, tracing larger planetesimals, have pinpointed the location of 26 Edgeworth-Kuiper belt analogs. We report that a belt's distance $R$ to its host star correlates with the star's luminosity…
Assuming the magnetic hypothesis for the formation of warps, we deduce a very simple formula for the warp curve in an idealized scenario. According to this formula the warp rises as the third power of radius in the innermost warped region,…
We measure the Galactic rotation curve and its first two vertical derivatives in the first and fourth quadrants of the Milky Way using the 21 cm VGPS and SGPS. We find tangent velocities of the atomic gas as a function of galactic longitude…
We used N-body simulations to model the 4.5 Gyr orbital evolution of the early Kuiper Belt, incorporating a massive protoplanetary disk, the four giant planets, and 1500 primordial Pluto-class bodies ("Plutos") that drove Neptune's grainy…
We describe new planetesimal accretion calculations in the Kuiper Belt that include fragmentation and velocity evolution. All models produce two power law cumulative size distributions, N_C propto r^{-q}, with q = 2.5 for radii less than…
A tight binding representation of the kicked Harper model is used to obtain an integrable semiclassical Hamiltonian consisting of degenerate "quantized" orbits. New orbits appear when renormalized Harper parameters cross integer multiples…
General orbits of a particle of small mass $\mu$ around a Kerr black hole of mass $M$ are characterized by three parameters: the energy, the angular momentum and the Carter constant. The time-averaged rates of change of the energy and the…
Recent developments in instrumentation (e.g., in particular the Kepler and CoRoT satellites) provide a new opportunity to improve the models of stellar pulsations. Surface layers, rotation, and magnetic fields imprint erratic frequency…
The notion of a classical particle is inferred from Dirac quantum fields on a curved space-time, by an eikonal approximation and a localization hypothesis for amplitudes. This procedure allows to define a semi-classical version of the…
Construction of a theory of orbits about a precessing oblate planet, in terms of osculating elements defined in a frame of the equator of date, was started in Efroimsky and Goldreich (2004) and Efroimsky (2005, 2006). We now combine that…